Thanks to the proliferation of consumer drones, you’d be forgiven for thinking that every aerial photo you see these days was snapped using one of the flying machines.
But Dutch photographer Loes Heerink has proved that a camera-equipped quadcopter isn’t always necessary when it comes to getting stunning shots from up high.
Snapping a series of beautiful images of street vendors in the Vietnamese city of Hanoi, Heerink simply made use of several of its bridges, the elevated vantage points offering a unique view of the traders as they made their way along the streets displaying their wares.
Artist of the Day: Overhead portraits of Vietnamese street vendors by Loes Heerink pic.twitter.com/oU2jYl5AqQ
— Fraktiøn Studio (@fraktionstudio) October 28, 2016
But whereas with a drone you can go pretty much anywhere, bridges – in case you hadn’t noticed – offer significantly less flexibility for photographers who prefer to point their camera downwards. Indeed, Heerink on some occasions would be left waiting a considerable amount of time for a suitable vendor to pass by.
“I would spend hours on top of a couple of locations in Hanoi waiting for vendors to walk underneath the bridge,” she says. “I once spent five hours on a location with no shots.”
Commenting on the vendors, Heerink adds, “They have no clue how beautiful their bicycles are, no idea they create little pieces of art every day.”
The photographer recently launched a Kickstarter campaign aimed at creating a photo book with around 100 of her striking images. She also plans to include short interviews with some of the vendors “to give you a little more insight into their lives.”
The campaign hit its modest €3700 (about $4050) funding target in just a couple of weeks, with Heerink hoping to ship the first copies of the book in July, 2017.
